A decade ago, India’s government seemed hell-bent on industrializing with coal, unleashing a tide of emissions.
India’s solar revolution comes as a surprise. Just a decade ago, apart from rooftop installations and a few microgrids serving remote rural villages, solar power was virtually unknown. The government seemed hell-bent on industrializing with coal, unleashing a rising tide of carbon dioxide emissions and supercharging climate change.
In 2015, shortly after taking office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to double coal output by 2020. And at successive international climate negotiations, his ministers pushed back angrily against demands that the country renounce the fossil fuels that drove industrialization in Europe and North America.
“How can anyone expect that developing countries make promises about phasing out coal [when they] still have to deal with poverty reduction?” environment minister Bhupender Yadav asked angrily at COP26 in Glasgow five years ago, before sabotaging the conference’s planned declaration on eliminating coal from the global economy.
But back home, policy was already changing. The country’s sunny climate made it a natural home for solar energy, and the cost of solar panels was falling fast. Ever since the Glasgow conference, India has been introducing solar energy at an accelerating rate. Last year, for the first time, more than half its installed generating capacity was from non-fossil fuel sources.
Sources: Ember, Energy Institute. Yale Environment 360 / Made with Flourish
As booming India’s electricity demand continues to grow by more than 6 percent each year, the solar trend is set to continue. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), about half the growth anticipated between now and 2030 will be met by solar power, and another 25 percent from other low-carbon sources, mostly wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear.
Leading the solar surge is the country’s largest private power producer and the world’s second largest solar developer, the Adani Group. Founded in 1988 initially as a commodity importer, by Gautam Adani, a long-time confidante of prime minister Modi and reputedly now Asia’s richest person, it is widely regarded as having benefited from Modi’s patronage.
Eyebrows were raised in 2023 when long-standing military protocols banning all construction within 6 miles of the border with Pakistan were set aside weeks before Adani gained control of that land for the Khavda project. And in 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Adani executives of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Indian government officials to obtain lucrative supply contracts for its solar energy and hiding this from potential investors. The case was dropped this month after Adani made offers to invest in the U.S., though U.S. officials denied any link.
India’s outdated grid cannot yet transmit all the solar power being captured in the western deserts to urban heartlands.
Still, the fast-growing Khavda solar park, which had installed capacity of 9.4 gigawatts as of April, is the jewel in the Adani crown. Its panels are attended by robots that dry-clean them at night to remove desert salt and dust without requiring precious freshwater. The project also includes wind turbines in the windy coastal region on the shores of the Arabian Sea, which should secure nighttime power for the grid.
India still has a long way to go to break its dependence on fossil fuels. Coal still delivers most of the country’s baseload and fuels about 70 percent of total power generation. It helps make India the world’s third largest carbon dioxide emitter, after China and the U.S, and is a major cause of the country’s urban smogs, which are the worst in the world. But the target to double coal mining output has been quietly forgotten, and construction of coal-fired power stations is much reduced. Coal’s share in the energy mix is set to fall below 50 percent by 2035, according to the IEA.
Still, with its enormous generating capacity, coal remains deeply entrenched. And there are other constraints on how much solar power can contribute to keeping the lights on in India. While solar last year made up 28 percent of the country’s total installed electricity generating capacity, it accounted for only 9.4 percent of the electricity put into supply.
Why the difference? There are two reasons.
Transmission lines carry power from the Pavagada Solar Park in Vollur, India. Abhishek Chinnappa / Getty Images
The first is that the country’s outdated grid cannot yet transmit all the solar power being captured in the deserts of western India to where it is needed in the urban heartlands. At times last year, almost 40 percent of the country’s solar power output did not reach customers.
Charith Konda, an India-based energy researcher for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, attributes this to the rapid growth of solar facilities, which has outstripped grid development. “Solar plants typically take 18 to 24 months to build, while transmission projects usually take about five years… The grid is trying to catch up.” To that end, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has committed to spending more than $100 billion on expanding the national grid by 29 percent by 2032, through a series of Green Energy Corridors linking solar hubs to major industrial and population centers.
But a revamped grid is only part of the answer, says Debajit Palit, who researches the country’s energy transition at the Chintan Research Foundation in New Delhi. Solar also under-delivers because India lacks the infrastructure to store renewable energy to meet demand after the sun goes down and during the cloudier monsoon season.
“The question is no longer whether solar can power India’s electricity system, but how quickly it can scale.”
One solution being hurriedly adopted is to use water as a battery — so-called pumped storage. This involves linking two storage tanks or reservoirs, one higher than the other. When the grid has surplus power, that electricity is used to pump water from the bottom tank to the top tank. Then, when the grid needs extra power, that can be generated by dropping the water through turbines to the lower tank.
Starting later this year, a 1.4-gigawatt project is expected to pump water from one of India’s largest hydroelectric reservoirs, the Gandhi Sagar on the Chambal River in the state of Madhya Pradesh. Another, with a capacity of 3 gigawatts, is set for completion near Mumbai in 2030. In January, the country’s Central Electricity Authority identified 120 potential pumped-storage sites with a combined capacity of 180 gigawatts.
Another solution to the storage problem is lithium-ion batteries. World battery prices are falling dramatically — down 58 percent since 2023, says Ember’s global electricity analyst Kostantsa Rangelova, “making round-the-clock solar electricity increasingly viable.”
Recognizing this, the Indian government has since last year required new solar farms to install battery storage so they can supply more constant power to the grid. Adani is currently assembling the country’s biggest battery storage system at the Khavda complex — enough to discharge over a gigawatt of power to the grid for three hours every evening.
A worker inspects photovoltaic cells at a solar factory in Mundra, India. Shammi MEHRA / AFP via Getty Images
An additional concern is that India remains heavily dependent on China for the technology behind its solar push. While it now manufactures most of its solar panels, the silicon materials that make the photovoltaic cells largely come from China, as do three-quarters of the lithium-ion batteries essential for energy storage.
The Indian government is working to address this reliance on its northern neighbor for the supply chain for its renewables technologies by boosting domestic manufacture. A more long-lasting constraint may be land.
Solar panels require a lot of space — a difficult issue in a densely populated country that has more people than China on little more than a third of the land area. In a few places, solar companies are offering farmers the option to continue cultivating below raised solar panels, so-called agrivoltaics. But elsewhere solar facilities are evicting peasant farmers, creating angry protests.
Occupying areas empty of people, such as the desert salt flats of Khavda, avoids disturbing people but may put wildlife at risk. The Khavda complex abuts the Rann of Kutch Wildlife Sanctuary in Pakistan, which is home to threatened species such as striped hyenas, desert lynx, jackals, and desert foxes, as well as critically endangered great Indian bustards and migrating waterfowl following the Central Asian Flyway from Siberia to the Indian Ocean.
India is installing solar generating capacity at almost the same rate as China once built coal-fired plants.
Despite such drawbacks, optimists believe that mass deployment of batteries should one day allow India to meet 90 percent of electricity demand from solar energy. “The question is no longer whether solar can power India’s electricity system,” says Rangelova, “but how quickly it can scale.”
Not all of India’s booming industries can easily banish coal and hook up to solar-powered electricity, however. One logjam is the steel industry, which requires coal to produce the intense heat needed for blast furnaces and to convert iron ore into pig iron and then steel. India has the most ambitious plans of any country in the world for increasing steel manufacturing, aiming to double production in the coming decade. “Steel is the elephant in the room for India’s decarbonization,” says Palit.
But in other sectors, the news is better. The country is electrifying its transportation system, for instance. The 42,000 miles of broad-gauge track in India’s vast railway network have been almost entirely electrified in the past decade. Meanwhile, electric road vehicles are moving into smoggy city streets. Most rapidly, India’s ubiquitous motorised rickshaws, often called tuk-tuks, are being electrified. Some 60 percent of sales of motorized rickshaws are now electric, making India the world leader.
Rooftop solar arrays in Ahmedabad, India. Ashish Vaishnav / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
The choking of oil and gas supplies from the Middle East in recent months will only further accelerate the country’s shift to electrify its transportation sector, says Konda.
Whatever the drawbacks, the rapid advance of Indian solar power continues, and marks a sharp difference from the energy path chosen by China and, until now, what has been seen by many countries as essential for their economic development.
For years booming China was notorious for building a new coal-fired power station every week. But India is avoiding that path. Its coal use is only 40 percent of that in China at a similar stage of economic development, according to Bond. Instead, it is installing solar generating capacity at almost the same rate as China once built coal plants.
With India’s leaders aiming to complete the country’s transition into a modern industrial economy by 2047 — the centenary of its independence from Britain — this matters for the world. India’s current per capita use of electricity is only a third of the global average, a fifth of that of China, and less than a tenth that of the U.S. Closing that gap by burning coal would be ruinous for the world’s climate. Achieving it with solar power could go a long way toward saving the planet.